Who's the Reader?

Review by Tom Shapcott

This collection consists of an Introduction by the editor, Brenda Walker,
then 26 brief essays, then a coda by Peter Bishop. There are 15 pieces
on writing fiction, 5 on the subject of poetry, and a half dozen essays
on general topics ranging from publication to the overall necessity for
writers to be readers and, perhaps most interestingly, a piece by Meme
McDonald called 'Whose Story?' which addresses an issue I find comes up
again and again among writing students: What are the moral obligations
of a writer to others, where material is based upon actual characters
or direct and recognisable appropriation?

Reading the book, my first question was: Who is the actual intended reader?
It is described in the title as 'a guide to writing' but I quickly became
aware that, though virtually all the articles are addressed to an imagined
apprentice writer, they were really intended for apprentice teachers of
writers.

A separate author has been commissioned to write each essay, and these,
in my mind, divided into writers-who-are-teachers, and teachers-who-are-writers.
There were a couple of surprises there, when I began to make that mental
distinction. As a general rule, though, writers-who-are-teachers had a
native cunning that insisted their pieces be immediately readable, be
lively or entertaining, and personal. They illustrated the primary adage
that an author cannot afford to bore his/her reader. The pieces which
I mentally classified as by teachers-who-are-writers did tend to be a
tad didactic, or eager to prove a point or a philosophy, or pointed to
a mental line in the sand that pupils might be expected to toe.

The specific subject of each essay was useful, and the first recommendation
I would make on this book was that these bite-size essays provide an excellent
crib for writers new to the teaching game. In the opening section, 'Writing
Fiction', Sari Smith has a pithy piece on that first imperative, Journals
and Notebooks. Then Marion Halligan provides a highly readable chapter
on Structuring the Story, Michael Meehan discusses Open Forms
of Narrative, while Glenda Adams opens the subject of the question
of Voice. This is a theme that is, in various ways, further developed
by Marele Day, Antoni Jach and Anthony Macris. As we all know, it is a
field crucial to the whole structuring of a piece of writing.

The surprise discovery of this opening section, though, is Kevin Brophy
on The Sentence in Time. It is brilliant and riveting. One should
not be surprised; Brophy's ground-breaking book Creativity was
an important Australian contribution to contemporary considerations of
the craft.

Tess Brady, on Place, in contrast offered immediate insights into
this essential, but sometimes neglected, aspect of establishing and consolidating
your fiction.

The essay which required most 'allowance' on my part, as a reader, was
Antoni Jach's piece on The Narrator and Narrative Modes in the Novel.
It was a slightly dogged disputation with the 'Show don't Tell' line of
persuasion, arguing that the narrative voice can be hobbled by too much
reliance on the 'Mimetic' to the exclusion of the 'Diegetic' (using, assiduously,
Gerard Genette's definitions). I use his own novel, The Layers of
the City, in my own classes, and I found this essay interesting as
an exegesis on the structure and intent of that book. But as a general
proposition to new writers, I felt it held the cane in one hand and the
Theory in the other.

The second section, 'Kinds Of Fiction', provides some entertaining and
thought-provoking pieces by Jean Bedford, Delia Falconer, Alan Gold (a
cheeky run-down on Popular Fiction), Van Ikin on Science
Fiction and Fantasy (which almost converted me 100% to the genres)
and a marvellously alluring essay by Stephen Muecke on Fictocritical
Writing, which he titles, perhaps tongue in cheek, The Fall.
Only Heather Wearne's piece on Autobiography seemed a bit, well,
ponderous, for such a fascinating subject. It carried too many burdens
of personal, or feminist, discord, and did not even cite some of the spectacular
instances of autobiographical writing by women in Australia. I would have
expected at least some reference to Dorothy Hewett's Wild Card,
or even Eve Langley's thinly-fictionalised The Pea Pickers, for
instance.

The section 'Writing Poetry', which is the only one with two essays each
(by Dennis Haskell and Marcella Polain) struck me as a bit perfunctory,
as if Brenda Walker, as editor, felt an obligation but not a passion to
include this area. It did not pass my notice that these two contributors
were, like Brenda Walker herself, also from Western Australia. Only Deborah
Westbury is a tothersider. Dennis Haskell's pieces cover the ground allotted
to them, but I must say, this is not the book to suggest to your student
who has discovered a passion and an aptitude for poetry.

The remaining half-dozen short pieces are fillers, which means that the
real meat of the volume is its concern with prose writing, and particularly
fiction, though the crossing of genres is becoming increasingly commonplace,
and aspects of the implications involved are touched on here.

Nigel Krauth has a necessary and splendidly down-to-earth piece on Learning
Writing through Reading, in which he pre-empts what I would have
said in this review on the plethora of How-To books. My shelves groan
with writing manuals, from Robert Louis Stephenson (Essays on the
Art of Writing, Chatto & Windus 1920) to Ursula Le Guin (Steering
the Craft, The Eighth Mountain Press 1998), Nadine Gordimer (Writing
and Being, Harvard Uni. Press 1995) and all the many recent Australian
ventures into this obviously lucrative market. I am selective, though,
in loaning specific volumes to students (and I keep that invaluable 'Check
Book' from Dymocks to keep trace of borrowings). Some students wax enthusiastic
over Carmel Bird's sharp-nosed informality, especially in Dear Writer
(Vintage 1996), while others prefer to stay with Kate Grenville's The
Writing Book (Allen & Unwin 1998), both of which have gone through
reprints.

The outstanding book, overall, in providing in-depth encouragement and
illumination of fiction writing, is the Canadian Jack Hodgins' A Passion
for Narrative (McClelland & Stewart 1993). It is still the leader
in the field, for my money, and its careful modulation through the processes
of evolution of a manuscript, with lively and likeable exercises and lots
of specific illustrations from the work of Canadian, American, Australian
and British authors, remains a tribute to the breadth of his reading and
research. He even offers suggestions on postmodernist techniques though,
frankly, he remains at heart an advocate of the 'Show don't Tell' school.
In my own classes I certainly try to suggest the positives of that approach,
though I also point out limitations, and offer a plethora of illustrations
from very recent writing. If, as Nigel Krauth points out in his essay,
reading is a crucial aspect of the process of becoming a writer, then
reading in the whole spectrum of immediately contemporary writing is also
very important. After all, novice writers will, in due course, be submitting
their manuscripts to publishers who will not only be aware of what has
appeared in the bookshops over the past eighteen months, they will also
know what will appear. A manuscript modelled on the style or approach
of a book well-loved thirty years ago will not necessarily seem pertinent
to a publisher's editor this month.

Knowing the poverty (in money terms) of students, I prepare a Course
Reader each year which is as important as the craft manuals (even Jack
Hodgins') on the recommended reading list. It covers the range of writing
genres, and though it sometimes traces a line of development (say, from
examples by Gertrude Stein, to Patrick White, to Ania Walwicz) more generally
it groups pieces by immediately contemporary writers, Australian and overseas.
Gillian Mears may be juxtaposed with, say, Alice Munro; Rohinton Mistry
with Christina Stead. The object is to invite the student to widen their
range of reading, as well as to look at the challenges each author may
have faced in tackling each particular subject, or theme. My purpose is
to ask the apprentice writer to look at the challenges faced by authors,
not be authors-as-theoretical analysts.

In looking at The Writer's Reader, then, my next question would
be: Is this a book to offer to students? Frankly, I see individual pieces
as full of pithiness and appropriateness; I would be tempted to use these
with my students, or to refer them on to them, after we had had a seminar
on the relevant subject. As I said at the beginning, it seems to me an
intelligent crib for a novice teacher in creative writing, a short-cut
to hone in onto necessary aspects in the teaching process. I am glad to
have it on my shelves. Its real value is in the essays on prose writing.
But for in-depth writing in that field, the Jack Hodgins book remains
my centrepiece.

For anyone interested in writing poetry, one book I have found particularly
helpful is Writing Poetry in Hodder & Stoughton's Teach
Yourself series (1997). Like Jack Hodgins' book, it offers many and
stimulating on-the-spot exercises, guaranteed to help the novice poet
to become inventive, as well as worldly-wise.

Tom Shapcott is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
Adelaide.